IBM Work With World’s Thinnest Material Seen Creating Faster PCs

A magnified image shows research samples with small holes covered by one-atom-thick graphene. Source: Rahul Nahir/University of Manchester via Bloomberg

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- A one-atom-thick layer of carbon may
one day help International Business Machines Corp. and the U.S.
military build more precise radar and computers that operate at
near the speed of light.

Physicists Konstantin Novoselov, 36, and Andre Geim, 52, at
the University of Manchester in the U.K., have found a way to
manipulate how graphene, the thinnest and toughest material ever
produced, conducts electricity, a breakthrough that opens the
door to its use in digital electronics.

Because graphene conducts electricity 30 times faster than
silicon -- approaching the speed of light, according to the
researchers -- the finding may be used by companies such as IBM
to speed up computers. The material was first isolated by the
two Russian-born scientists in 2004, and they were awarded a
Nobel Prize last year. The latest research was published last
week in the journal Science.

“They’ve observed a phenomenon that was unattainable
previously,” said Yu-Ming Lin, an IBM researcher who developed
the first integrated circuit from wafer-size graphene in June.
The Armonk, New York-based company, which funded the study along
with Samsung Electronics Co. and the U.S. Air Force and Navy,
will now consider how to use graphene in semiconductors and
computers, he said.

Until recently, use of graphene was limited to development
of more-efficient batteries and foldable touch screens, items
that didn’t require scientists to be able to stop and start the
movement of electrons in the material. Novoselov and Geim were
able to control the current by suspending two layers of graphene
in a vacuum, reordering the electronic structure.

‘New-Type Transistors’

The finding may lead to “completely new types of
transistors,” Novoselov said in a telephone interview. “You
can probably start using it for computer chips, but we believe
we have something different, bigger here.”

The finding is “bringing people’s attention back to
graphene,” and spurring a new look at whether the material “is
usable in digital widgets,” IBM’s Lin said.

The international market for graphene-based products may
reach $675 million by 2020, Wellesley, Massachusetts-based BCC
Research LLC estimated in February, when the material’s use as a
semiconductor was considered impossible. If the new research
leads to semiconductor devices, graphene would be entering what
the Washington-based Semiconductor Industry Association said was
a $298.3 billion industry worldwide in 2010.

“Within the next couple years you will hear a lot about
transistors based on bilayer graphene,” Geim said in an e-mail.
“It will be a very long road to graphene integrated circuits.”

Mobile Phones, Radar

IBM, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, is researching the material’s
ability to create more-efficient mobile phones, clearer wireless
signals, and better radar, Lin said. The material’s magnetic
traits may also enable IBM to utilize high frequency waves for
medical devices that would spot diseases early on, Lin said.

Novoselov and Geim are part of a $1.4 billion effort put
together by nine European organizations, including the
University of Cambridge and Finland-based Nokia Oyj, to research
graphene. Geim and Novoselov discovered graphene by extracting
the material from a piece of graphite such as is found in
ordinary pencils, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said
last year when announcing the scientists won the Nobel in
Physics.

Nokia Research

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones by
volume, is investigating the material’s potential use in cell
phones, touch screens, and printed electronics. Graphene as a
cheap replacement for current touch screen technology is right
around the corner, said Jani Kivioja, a research leader at Nokia
whose team develops graphene’s electronic sensing ability.

“This replacement is really low-hanging fruit, it can
happen really soon,” Kivioja said in an interview.

Graphene’s flexibility and strength - it’s 300 times
tougher than steel - may lead to the Nokia Morph, the first
foldable phone, the company said on its blog in June.

“In the longer run, it might be possible that graphene
could replace silicon,” Kivioja said.

BCC Research said in February that the products using
graphene are likely to be energy storage devices known as
capacitors, and structural materials. Graphene capacitors used
in vehicle batteries are efficient, according to a July 27 study
by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

“With a graphene battery the same amount of weight and
volume as a current one, you could drive 300 miles instead of
100,” said Yuegang Zhang, a principal investigator at the lab.
“In that case, you’ll like to buy an electrical car.”

Shifting Research

Research into the material has shifted more and more to
companies from universities, said Elena Polyakova, chief
executive officer at Calverton, New York-based Graphene
Laboratories, Inc. She said that 30 percent of business comes
from companies, compared with 10 percent when they started
selling the material two years ago.

The company, in partnership with Ronkonkoma, New York-based
CVD Equipment Corp., sells four-square-inch wafers of graphene
for about $1,000. Many customers have inquired about bilayer
graphene, Polyakova said.

“Demand is so high we oversold for the next two months,”
Polyakova said in an interview. “They want anything that can be
used for semiconductors.”